Care in the After-life

Peter Preston: Osborne's inheritance tax stunt worked for precisely the reason Brown thought that it wouldn't - logic.Psst! Wanna find the issue that kiboshed an election? The one they call Bottled Brown? Come stroll with me across the road ... first right, second left and down towards Peckham. In a moment, we'll be leaving Tessa Jowell territory and venturing into Harriet Harman land. labor slightly marginal and Labour safe, in short. And the houses signal exactly that to any seasoned canvasser. They're grey Victorian terraces: hunched homes for workers churned out in their tens of thousands long ago.

From time to time, a Chinese takeaway or pub leavens the mix. Occasionally, you'll hit stretches of red-brick Edwardiana or 40-year-old boxes of flats. But this is penny plain London. No tube or Olympics. No airs, few graces. Welcome to Millionaires' Row.

Are you hunting for a family des-res with three bedrooms and a squirt of garden somewhere down Mean Street, SE London? Then scan estate agents' windows. Here's a dark flat in one of those lowering council blocks Mrs T gave the right to buy. It's £179,000 - some £3,000 over the national average already - and the only bargain in this particular basement.

Frankly, you'll mostly get maisonettes for under £300,000, at which inheritance tax chips in this year. But frankly, too, you'd be better looking harder and making do. When I put £200,000 maximum on a net search around Clap ham, three miles west, the computer stalled. Nothing, absolutely nothing, doing.

It's crazy, of course, and crippling. But it also sends two pointed signals. First, our political masters have lost touch with London, and second, that they shouldn't have seemed so stunned when George Osborne's inheritance tax wheeze turned out such a poll-turner.

Of course, the standard arguments against Osborne's million-quid tax break do have force. House price windfalls aren't a reward for a lifetime's hard work. Pass them down to the next generation and you probably produce a more divided, less motivated society. Add a spoonful of exaggeration by saying only 6% of the population is affected - not "nine million families" - plus a pinch of greed, and the brew bubbles nicely. Logic says stand fast. Logic says death is the perfect moment for a revenue strike.

But contrary logic unhinged the Treasury's planners last Monday. Logic wiped away ICM leads. Logic left Downing Street's finest open-mouthed, spluttering, pulling a comfort blanket over their heads. It's sensible to understand why.

First, there's the London and south-east glitch. Brown and Darling lodge here in tied houses, with wee Dougie Alexander not so far away; Ming Campbell lives on Commons expenses. They're all visiting Scots, not Londoners, and Scottish homes have risen least through this property boom. Thus Sir Ming can tout his new local income tax north of the border and talk of "rich" households earning £70,000 or so. But look around at your primary school deputy head married to a police inspector in Dept ford; at a GP living with a nurse in Hackney; at a London underground driver whose partner runs a hairdressing salon down Balham high street. Are they rich? They wouldn't for a second think so. Ming's dreaming. This is London. It's not average this or average that. London turkeys don't vote for Christmas.

Listen to the politicians banging on about duty and family, about prudence and debt. So duty means providing for your family. And prudence means keeping cash in the bank - maybe Northern Rock - to pay for a nursing home or university place down the track. Does all that end, though, when you keel over? Does care cease to count if you're dead? The difficulty - minus greed, remember, because corpses don't do avarice - is you can't switch off the instincts that have shaped your life. You need to leave something behind you (including peace of mind without fire sales, if you can).

The society Gordon Brown was hymning yesterday - aspirational, skilled, big R for responsible - is precisely the sort of society that doesn't switch off emotionally when the lights go out. What's aspiration in aid of, pray? That's why inheritance tax, long before Osborne, was loved by a mere one in four. Over half of London households face some kind of bill for it already, not to mention one in three across the south. Particular areas, particular swings, particular problems beyond any reassuring UK norm.

Sneering about the super-rich in Harman land doesn't quite do it, then. Democracy has its own perverse psychology - and its balky verdicts. Look out for them now along the grey terraces in a London far, far from Whitehall: the London that nobody notices till its swings break your nose.
© Guardian News & Media 2008
Published: 10/7/2007